


rupert and the spaceman

by jontinf



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Attempt at Humor, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-07
Updated: 2015-05-07
Packaged: 2018-03-29 09:56:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3892012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jontinf/pseuds/jontinf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He inches closer, pulls on the duvet slightly, gives the sight some thought and frowns. “Clara Oswald,” he says, “when did you decide to grow a beard?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	rupert and the spaceman

“Clara!” The Doctor looms over the side of her bed, holding his arms officiously behind his back like a dementor turned antique inspector. He inches closer, pulls on the duvet slightly, gives the sight some thought and frowns. “Clara Oswald,” he says, “when did you decide to grow a beard?”

“It’s me, Doctor,” Danny says, rubbing his face blearily and sitting up, the lone occupant of Clara’s bed at the moment.

Danny’s had dreams like this. The last time they were tap dancing with a bear. He was dressed like a magician, and the Doctor was wearing one of Danny’s math pun t-shirts.

The Doctor theatrically flips over the duvet and examines the entire bed as though there’s a chance Clara might have sleep-rolled down to its foot.

“ _Hey_ ,” Danny protests.

“Where’s Clara?”

Danny gestures at the window. “She’s at a hen night.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s out celebrating before her friend Anna’s wedding.” Anna was yet another individual who decided that Danny was an _unscrupulous seducer of women_ , always waggling her eyebrows and proclaiming _“naughty!”_ at everything he said. It was completely unjustified. She’d seen him in his math pun t-shirt.

“You weren’t invited?” the Doctor grins. “ _How embarrassing_.”

“It’s typically just women.”

“Is that what Clara told you to spare your feelings?”

This is his life now. Old Scottish men climb into his bedroom at night, stand at his bedside, and nonsensically taunt him. It’s the kind of thing mothers tell children who won’t eat their turnips.

Danny sighs. “Why are you here?”

The Doctor folds his arms and turns his back on him. “It’s far too complicated for you, PE.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I’ll pass on the message.”

The Doctor turns around and looks at him with the same put upon, duckface expression one might get once they realize they’ve just given away their credit card information to a phony party supplies company in Staffordshire. He then pulls out a rolled up newspaper from a pocket inside his jacket and unravels it onto the bed.

As he watches the Doctor turn the pages, Danny realizes that the newspaper is from 1963, despite not looking remotely affected by the passage of time. There’s an actual scathing review of a Beatles concert in it.

The Doctor finally arrives at the page that he wants, and Danny makes a face. “You were going to pull Clara out of bed to help you solve the Sunday crossword from 1963. You’re older than I thought.”

“Don’t be daft." The Doctor pulls out a stopwatch from another pocket inside his coat. “I need her to time me, so I can beat my previous record.”

“Sure, _I’m_ the daft one,” Danny mutters under his breath. Actually. _Actually_ , that is kind of adorable—or it would be adorable if he and the Doctor didn’t officially hate each other. They’d file papers if they could.

Danny lets out a forfeiting huff and then reaches out his hand. He’ll do it for Clara, for Queen and Country, and for crossword enthusiasts everywhere. It should be noted that he hasn’t slept in over twenty four hours. He’s just returned from herding frenetic twelve-year-olds around the Cotswolds. _Never again_.

“Give it to me,” Danny says.

“What?”

“The timer.”

The Doctor is aghast. “It won’t be the _same_.”

Danny smirks, _finally_ something to hold over him. “What, you need a pretty young woman to watch you do everything in life?”

“You’re pretty enough!” The Doctor’s eyebrows are practically crashing into each other.

“Okay,” Danny says uncertainly. Maybe this is a dream.

The Doctor freezes mid-stance, bulging eyes and open hands hovering in the air like he’s waiting for a goblin under the bed to jump up and bite him on the nose. “Wait!”

“What?”

“This is working for me.”

 _"_ Well, shit," Danny thinks, "this is _one of those dreams."_

“Your belligerence,” the Doctor adds.

“Bellige—?!”

“Here,” he throws the stopwatch at Danny’s head, which is caught perfectly before impact. Danny can almost read the look in the Doctor’s eyes, something that says, “ _Nobody_ likes a show-off, PE.”

“Ho-kay!” the Doctor announces as he takes a pen out of his pocket and kneels on the floor to use the bed as a desk. “I stole this off of Richard Nixon, you know.”

He looks at Danny for some impressed reaction but is given nothing more than a shrug of _“yeah, whatever.”_  It’s Nixon, not Gandhi. The Doctor takes umbrage at this, probably plotting in his head to find something in the entire universe that will dumbfound and captivate the not to be swayed Danny Pink. He really wouldn’t have to search far. She’s currently at a hen night, enjoys explaining Proust to him, politely smiles at his enthusiasm for polynomials, and is best friends with a two thousand-year-old extra-terrestrial biological entity.

Danny holds up the stopwatch. “This isn’t, like, a puzzle you’ve already solved, right?”

“No!”

“Alright, alright.” They share a look for one long, frankly, surreal second, before he says, “ _Go_.”

What happens next is a bit unnerving, like the little demon girl in _The Exorcist_ crab-walking down the stairs unnerving.

The Doctor, sweating a bit, determinedly pinches his pen, only a quick glance at the clues before writing down the word immediately in the squares. It’s a cryptic puzzle, so it’s even more baffling how he’s doing it. He has the mind of one of those super computers. How does he ever manage to sleep?

“Done!” the Doctor says, slamming the pen on the duvet. It bounces, the ink leaking on the fabric. The girlfriend won’t be happy about that.

“Wow,” Danny says, gazing at the stopwatch.

The Doctor watches him eagerly. “How was it?”

“Thirty six seconds.”

“What?!” He grabs the stopwatch from Danny. “Let me see.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m slower by a millisecond.” The Doctor has the stricken and lost look of a child who’s just been told that they were adopted. (Danny thinks he’s allowed to make those jokes, considering that he spent a bulk of his life in a children’s home.)

The Doctor claps a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “This is the end, PE. I’m degenerating. What’s left of my dying mind will be rationed into little plastic cups for the consumption of children by Thursday.”

Danny stares back at him, unsure if this is an actual space-medical thing or if he’s just being really overdramatic. It’s always hard to tell with him. He offers, “I don’t think they typically serve Time Lord brain in children’s pudding?”

“What are you two doing together in the dark?”

Both their heads swiftly turn to find Clara standing in her bedroom doorway, arms folded and a shoe in hand. She’s wearing the same outfit she wore on their first date. Danny and the Doctor share a sigh in relief.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” Danny says.

“I have night vision,” the Doctor explains.

“He thinks he’s dying,” Danny adds.

Clara looks at the Doctor knowingly. “Was it because of the crossword again?”

“ _No,”_ the Doctor replies, utterly offended.

Danny steps out of bed and walks over for a kiss. “How was the hen night?”

Clara laughs, the kind of upset, exasperated laugh of someone who’s just survived a comedy of errors. “Anna got food poisoning, Meera made a Dream Boy cry, and I broke a heel.”

“Is Anna alright?” Danny asks, because that’s what a nice person is supposed to say. The slightly pettier person within him is fist-pumping the air and shouting, _“Thank you, Karma!”_

Before Clara can answer, the Doctor asks, “What’s a Dream Boy?” He’s not even looking at them, having torn the crossword page from the newspaper and examining it like it’s malfunctioned.

Clara and Danny look at each other, and then Danny says, “It’s when a man takes off his clothes—”

“—right, shut up,” the Doctor says. “You could have just said male stripper. I’m an alien, not a child.”

This time Clara's laugh is more genuine, and she rests her head on the side of Danny’s arm. “Three’s a crowd at this time of night. Don’t you think, Doctor?”

“I was about to say.” The Doctor plunks himself on top of the covers, plucks yet another rolled up newspaper from his pocket, points at Danny, and tosses the stopwatch back at him, which he catches perfectly once again. “Now the aim of the game is no more than thirty seconds.”

Danny looks at Clara desperately. “I’m not entirely sure how this happened.”

Her finger casually traces a circle on his chest. “Admit it, Mr. Pink, there’s a part of you that wants to see him break his own record.”

Danny looks at the Doctor, who’s sitting cross-legged on Clara’s bed and reading over a newspaper from 1967, muttering something about having personally seen his good pal Thurgood sworn into the American Supreme Court that year.

“I’ll put on the kettle,” Clara says, handing him a broken shoe and dropping her bag on the floor before leaving the room.

He sighs all the way back to bed, and the Doctor glances up, a faint, expectant smile on his face, probably unaware that he’s even doing it. It’s the kind of look Danny sees lonely kids get when somebody finally decides to sit with them at lunch. He never thought of the Doctor that way, as that kid. This explains some about why Clara is so attached to him, along with his apparently being on a first name basis with Thurgood Marshall.

“You ready, Doc?” he says, his thumb hovering over the top button of the stopwatch. Obviously, he’s doing it for Clara, and for Queen and Country, and maybe, _maybe_ a little bit for that old crotchety officer as well.

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in a world where Clara tells everyone the truth after "Mummy on the Orient Express," and Danny and the Doctor still hate each other but also kind of don't. Because they know better.
> 
> Special thanks to dragonlordette for being my beta and for her spectacular euphemisms for the male anatomy.


End file.
